White House lawyer told to give evidence
The House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection has issued a subpoena to former White House lawyer Pat Cipollone, whose reported resistance to Donald Trump’s schemes to overturn his 2020 election defeat has made him a potentially revelatory witness.
Cipollone is said to have stridently and repeatedly warned the former president and his allies against their efforts to challenge the election, at one point threatening to resign as Trump eyed a dramatic reshuffling atop the Justice Department.
One witness said Cipollone referred to a proposed letter making false claims about voter fraud as a ‘‘murder- suicide pact’’.
Another said Cipollone had warned her that Trump was at risk of committing ‘‘every crime imaginable’’.
It’s the first action from the committee since Wednesday’s dramatic testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, whose account of what she saw and heard as an aide in the White House raised new questions about whether Trump or some of his allies could face criminal liability.
As Trump’s top White House lawyer, Cipollone was present for key meetings in the turbulent weeks after the election when Trump and associates – including GOP policymakers and lawyer Rudy Giuliani – plotted ways to challenge the election.
The subpoena sets the stage for a possibly protracted legal fight between a Congress determined to assert its authority and a former executive branch employee privy to intimate and sensitive Oval Office deliberations.
As White House counsel, effectively the administration’s chief lawyer, Cipollone could try to argue that his conversations with the president are privileged and that he is therefore exempt from testifying, though such claims would most likely need to be resolved in the courts. The committee pressed ahead anyway, saying Cipollone could have information about several efforts by Trump allies to subvert the Electoral College, from organising so-called alternate electors in states Biden won to trying to appoint a loyalist as attorneygeneral who championed false theories of voter fraud.
While Cipollone has sat for an informal interview, the committee said it required his cooperation on the record after obtaining evidence on which he was ‘‘uniquely positioned to testify’’.
Bennie Thompson, the committee’s Democratic chairperson, and Liz Cheney, the panel’s Republican vice-chairperson, suggested he had resisted transcribed testimony because of concerns about executive privilege. In a statement announcing the subpoena, they said ‘‘any concerns Mr Cipollone has about the institutional prerogatives of the office he previously held are clearly outweighed by the need for his testimony. We are left with no choice but to issue you this subpoena,’’ Thompson wrote in a letter to Cipollone.
While Cipollone’s words and warnings have been prominent throughout the public hearings this month, Hutchinson shared more about his actions, revealing that he was trying frantically in the days before January 6 to prevent Trump from going to the Capitol as the election results were certified.
On January 3, he warned that there were ‘‘serious legal concerns’’ if Trump accompanied the protesters to the Capitol, saying: ‘‘We need to make sure that this doesn’t happen.’’
By the morning of January 6, Cipollone was urging Hutchinson, then an aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows, to ‘‘keep in touch’’ about any possible movements by the president and ‘‘please make sure we don’t go up to the Capitol, Cassidy’’.